


When I Was Dazzled By Eternal Things

by raedbard



Category: The West Wing
Genre: Community: tww_minis, Gen, Pre-Canon, Unresolved Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-01-10
Updated: 2009-01-10
Packaged: 2017-10-06 12:56:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,023
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/53896
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/raedbard/pseuds/raedbard
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"He smiles back, and the little wrestling ball of anxiety in C.J.'s stomach, fluttering pointed feathers and all, takes flight." On the campaign trail, both Sam and C.J. find themselves slightly lost.</p>
            </blockquote>





	When I Was Dazzled By Eternal Things

**Author's Note:**

> for amy_vic in the tww_minis secret santa exchange.

For C.J. it stretches like a band of blank desert -- the campaign trail. In her mind it is a little like the Yellow Brick Road, and she expects the requisite flying monkeys, has to stop herself checking the sky for spying witch-eyes. It was a little like a whirlwind, getting here -- packing bags blind and Toby's fingers tugging on her sleeve as she tried to lock a front door that soon wouldn't be hers at all; everything still feeling like home but crumbling and dusty, hard to see somehow as she looked back over her shoulder, telling Toby to shut up when he tried to hurry her for the hundredth time, watching the walls of this life she didn't even like that much shimmer and start to fall down and being scared, the way she hadn't been scared for years and years. Then the plane with Toby, holding her breath as they took off and trying not to think or grab his hand, and not knowing why it seemed so important not to be weak in front of him; because that made no sense, because this was _Toby_. And when she turned to glance at him, he was already staring at her -- the colour of a night without stars in it, but warm.

He had said, "What's going on?" very softly, almost lost under the roar of the engine. He hadn't said it like a question that needed an answer but more like he'd seen her across the other side of the street in the morning, waving hello with the _New York Times_ crumpled in his hand; just _how you doing?_ not a plan to keep her from falling apart.

"I'm fine, Toby. I'm good. I might even be said to be _flying_."

"That's funny," he said, without smiling.

"I am funny."

"Yes, I know."

"It's just ... "

She threw the words away into the cabin, hoping they'd die in the aisle. But he heard them.

"Just ... what?"

Just the blank road ahead, she had thought, and no signposts.

Because when Toby is gone he leaves a dark, swelling space behind him; a hole into which C.J.'s understanding of her job in this campaign, her voice in the choir, her place on the bus, falls. And she only knows one other person that logic suggests might understand that, or some fraction of it; whose eyes follow the echoes of Toby's footsteps as they leave hotel rooms and climb down from bus steps, though she doesn't think desperation is the itch that bites at Sam. Not quite.

Sam is sitting in the bus with her, in the seat just behind the driver. There is a pen and paper in his hands and a look on his face like he is determined that they won't get the better of him. He's in a shirt and tie, even though no one except Leo McGarry has worn anything more formal than a college sweatshirt for weeks now. The tie is loose around his neck and the first two buttons of the shirt are undone, but she thinks he could probably look scrubbed-up and preppy in sackcloth and ashes (or at least give it the good ol' college try) so long as he could still flash the grin that Toby has started to call, under his breath to her, The Seaborn Dazzler.

"Hey," she says, both reaching out and flinching from the too-bright peal of her voice in the air. She hates sounding uncertain, or to have the sound of her uncertainty balancing on the tip of her tongue, hates it so very much.

He looks up. He smiles. He is always smiling; she doesn't think he knows exactly why it makes her feel a lot better. "Hi."

"What're you doin' there?"

Sam looks back down at his legal pad and sighs. "I still have no idea what to do about the stump speech. Toby was banging around before. Kinda stomped on my creative impulse a little, I think."

"Yeah. Think I heard that."

"Some _really_ complicated metaphors for incompetence. At least I think that's what he meant," Sam says, still smiling at her. The light in his eyes strikes her a little like a sunset, sad but trying to hide it behind beauty; and whether Sam knows it or not he is very beautiful. A few times when Sam has been close to her and the light is failing outside the bus and the tired breathing of the engine is slowing her own towards sleep, she has found scraps of poetry she didn't realise she knew by heart tilting into her mind. It's like being sixteen, in her high school English class, yawning, hair getting into her eyes and Molly Lapham's voice droning in her ears, but flicking ahead in the book, finding Roethke: _was I too glib about eternal things_ and getting a shiver she didn't entirely like running up the back of her blouse. He is beautiful like that, and so probably doesn't know it.

"Yeah, I really did hear that."

Sam shrugs. She smiles at him, and it's half to comfort him and half because her eyes got caught in the little wings of Sam's collar that look so sharp, and so like a child's way of catching a bird on paper. He smiles back, and the little wrestling ball of anxiety in C.J.'s stomach, fluttering pointed feathers and all, takes flight.

*

The next morning Sam eats breakfast alone but for his mostly-blank legal pad in a diner off Main Street. He looks out the window while he waits for his coffee to cool off enough to drink and he watches three trucks go past and stares at their plates before he remembers exactly what city they're in and that he hasn't called Lisa in over a week and she's gonna be so pissed and that he still hasn't got a damn clue about the speech and all he's heard from Toby on the matter is beautifully crafted abuse, then he realises that, since this is New England in October, he's left the coffee to sit for too long and it has already gone past lukewarm and is edging towards straight-up cold. Sam sighs, and pokes a fork into his eggs.

"Sam?"

Sam looks up, into possibly the last face he wants to see at this moment, with the morning hanging off him like an overlarge coat and his eyes sooty-black and tired and his hands waving around in the air as if to say _what the hell?_

"Hi, Toby."

A pause, a breath. Then, "Hey." Another pause, a heavier one this time -- all the weight Toby can put into silence, which for Sam is a profound, almost gravitational quantity; pulling him towards itself to be eaten. Then, "We didn't know where you'd gone."

Sam smiles, first down at the plate and then up at Toby, knowing neither will dazzle. "Just breakfast."

"You didn't want to, uh, eat with us?"

"I just wanted to think," Sam says. "About the speech."

"About the speech?"

"Yeah."

"_Okay_," Toby says, and Sam thinks he says it in a way whose subtext runs something like _what's to think about? it's just a speech_ and he wonders what it can be like to be able to command words to march onto a blank piece of paper and make them orderly and correct, and then make them sing 'The Star-Spangled Banner'. Sam sighs. "Well," Toby says, "Don't forget your way back." Sam starts to frown at him, then turns it into another smile, a nod. Then Toby says, "I'm teaching C.J. basketball later on."

Sam opens his mouth, then realises he has no suitable reply to that sentence at hand. "What?"

"Basketball. C.J. It'll be fun," he says. Toby almost smiles, and even though it is mostly in his eyes Sam feels its mirror grow on his own face, mostly out of shock. "Trust me. You don't wanna miss it," he says, and raises his eyebrows for a fraction of a second over a look that makes Sam feel, for a second, that if he stays here and tries to get hold of as much of the ungraspable genius of Toby Ziegler as he can and breathe it in and keep it close, then he has a tiny, glancing chance of being able to make a sentence beautiful one day, and then Toby is gone -- and Sam is left, cold eggs and colder coffee, and an empty pad.

*

When Toby has gone, later, and after one of the volunteers has come to tape a little tarp over the hole in the window, they pass the basketball between themselves. Eventually the ball makes less noise in their hands, as the smack of rubber against skin becomes covered in whatever of their secrets they have let go, along with the pop of the ball.

"How's the speech?"

"Good."

"Yeah?"

"Well, okay."

"Okay?"

"Kinda stalled, actually."

"Uh huh."

"Yeah."

"It's no sweat, Sam."

"It's not?"

"There's a few days before we have to have anything locked down, and Toby's not too tied up in -- "

"No, I have to do this myself."

"Sam!"

"I have to do this myself, C.J."

"Because this is big school now?"

"Well, I would have gone with the big _leagues_, but ... "

"But?"

"I can't go running to Toby every time something goes wrong here."

"You want to get this right, huh?"

"Well. Yes."

"He thinks you can do it you know."

"He does?"

"Or he wouldn't be banging around."

"I guess I thought that came naturally."

"Well, yes. But the other thing too."

"He's talked to you?"

"No. Well, not really."

"_Not really_?"

"You know, Sam, you could try _relaxing_ and not constantly pushing for, whatever, you know -- the impossible reaches of perfection that are being aggravated by your really very sweet but also pretty ridiculous paranoia!"

"I could, huh?"

She laughs, and pops the ball extra hard. He gets the air knocked out of his stomach by the velocity of the ball, but he is laughing too. She smiles, and hopes that he does not see her.

"You're like him, you know. Toby."

"No, I really don't think I am."

"Well, less Jewish, I guess."

"You know me so well, C.J."

"You betcha."

A pause. A silence filled only with the back-and-forth of the ball, now growing louder, like breathing seems to in the presence of a loved one from whom you are trying to hide the depths and qualities of your love. Eventually, he asks:

"So, how ... ?"

"How, what?"

"How d'you know, about ... ?"

"I've just been playing the game longer, Sam."

"How long?"

"A while."

"Huh."

"Sam?"

"Yeah?"

"I'm scared too, you know."

"Who said anything about being scared?"

"Sam."

"Yeah, okay. And, yes, I know."

"You _knew_?"

"Well, not about you. But being scared?"

"Yeah."

"_Yeah_."

*

They don't sleep in the bus, of course. Except when they do.

Moonlight has flooded the aisle and is creeping up the seat backs. It has gathered in her hair -- he notices, swallowing -- as though someone has poured a glass of moonlit water into the rolled-up sweater she is using as a pillow and the water is soaking up her neck. That thought makes him worry for a moment that she is not comfortable, and that maybe he should do something about it, before he remembers that it was just a simile.

Toby said something earlier about not letting the speech mess up absolutely everything else going on in his brain, since after all they couldn't always be there to pull him out of the path of oncoming trucks. And in the rush to work out whether all that was just a sarcastic remark about the habits of certain people in this staff daring to have breakfast by themselves, Sam had forgotten to say anything about that ship having already sailed. Possibly _months_ before. All he ever seems to do anymore is worry about words and syntax and connotations and how to make the untextured words he writes down on the page sound like something the President of these United States would say.

So confusing one piece of romantic imagery with real life isn't such a big deal. But he still wishes he hadn't done it.

Sam turns over (or around, so he is facing the window and not the aisle; so he cannot see her) and tries to get some sleep. But he dreams without meaning to: he dreams thick whorls of ink writing themselves over her face and a dark January watching the inauguration on television instead of beside the podium and Toby, standing in the dark corner of Sam's living room, spreading black disapproval like oil across the carpet.

He wakes up, with a jolt, and looks up, into her face.

"Sam?"

"Uh. Sorry. Was I -- "

"You were doing some pretty intense dreaming there."

"Sorry. I ... Did I wake you?"

"I wasn't really asleep."

"Yeah?"

"Moonlight. Was getting a little bright. I was starting to worry I'd dream of Fed. investigators asking me about ethics at the DNC." She smiles, and puts her hand on Sam's shoulder, and her palm is warm through the thin cotton of his tee shirt, and his eyes slip up to hers. "You okay?"

"Sure," he says, trying -- though he does not do so consciously -- to outshine the moon with the smile he returns to her. "Yeah, I'm fine."

"You couldn't sleep either."

"Why are we sleeping on the bus anyway?"

"Hard money contributions just aren't what they were, Sam. And I think I heard Leo said something about Legionnaires' disease in the hotels around here."

Sam raises his eyebrows. "Huh. Well, okay then."

"It's nice that he cares, I thought."

"_Yeah_."

"Listen, you wanna do something? I got a deck of cards in my bag -- "

"You keep a deck of cards in your purse?"

"What? You mean you don't?" She pushes at his shoulder. The word 'joshing' enters Sam's mind and then slips out again. "C'mon," she says, "It'll be fun."

"Gin rummy at three in the morning? You people have a really bizarre sense of fun," he mutters.

"But you like us."

"I suppose."

*

As the sun comes up and he starts to fidget around the edges of his legal pad, his fingers tapping on its margins, she realises that she is not scared anymore. She watches him, pressing her hands together to get a hold of the urge she has to put her fingers in his hair and make everything crooked there straight again. Sam's black hair has grown a halo; sunlight, but to her it seems slightly coloured with blue, particles gathering around each hair now out of place -- the untidiest she has ever seen him these past few months, as though the chaos they have breathed and worn and held in their mouths like ice that won't dissolve has started to batter against his face, leaving lines and tiredness; the dimmer switch on his smile set low or much too high, never anything in between. And as she knows that she is no longer hurtling around atom by atom in roaring space, she also knows that he is still staring into the prospect of his nothingness, frightened.

They aren't talking anymore, and the deck of cards is disregarded on the table-top. He had been watching the night fade up into sunrise, as though there were answers somewhere in the darkness, slipping away. Now he is just staring at the pad.

Eventually he looks up, and takes in one deep breath. He says, "I really need to go shower, Legionnaires' disease or not."

She laughs, and does it sound like an elder sister's laugh, shoring up the facts of what is certain and what is not, or more like a sweetheart's, a prom date's -- vibrations of her nervousness carrying through the air, weightless, like a blow on a cymbal.

"Okay. You need my key?"

"No, I've got one. At least I hope I do. I don't trust Toby not to have slipped me the card for some mad old lady with a fetish for young lawyers."

"You are learning, Grasshopper."

He smiles, ducking his head. "I guess I just knock really loudly before I go in, right?"

"I would think so, yes."

"Okay. I'll see you in a few."

He makes for the door of the bus and catches his hip a glancing blow on the armrest of one of the seats. She hears a muffled _ow_ but he keeps on walking. She grins, then calls out.

"Sam?"

He turns. The sun is up now, bright in that way only a midwinter sun can be, making his skin seem paler than a Californian's should ever be, making his eyes a keepsake of summer. She walks down the bus to him and she takes the hand that isn't clutching his holdall in her own. His fingers are shocked, like her hands were full of ice water. She squeezes his fingers, runs her thumb over the run of his knuckles.

"What, C.J. ...?" he asks, whispering.

She smiles at him and she hopes it looks wise and controlled and grown-up, though their propinquity -- the up-tilt of his face, the strange sharp square of his jaw, the place behind his collar hiding the ungraspable scent of men that she wants so much to put her mouth against -- has brought her back to the line between controlled and falling, and she is spinning gently. She smiles at him, and presses a kiss to his cheek.

"You dazzle me."

"I ... _C.J._ \-- "

"Someday," she begins, and catches in his eyes no shock of understanding. Too early, but he'll understand one day. "I ... It's gonna be okay, Sam."

"Really?"

"When we're at the inauguration and everyone's heard _President_ Bartlet's speech and everyone's trying to pretend they're not crying because it talked about everything they'd forgotten they needed and everything beautiful that they'd thought was always going to be rotten, then I'll say I told you so. Deal?"

He looks at her, the beginnings of a thousand thousand speeches swirling particles in his eyes.

"Deal," he says.


End file.
